Ta da!

Going to Stanford during the beginning of the digital music revolution, I was taking advantage of MP3 technology early on. Back then, when we wanted to create digital copies of our CDs, we had to rip the songs off of CD, converting them to WAV files and then encode those WAV files to MP3 files, each step requiring a separate piece of software. In fact, MP3 codecs were hard to come by, so we had a little pirated utility. And I have to admit, since I knew the old skool way to do it, the few times I have encoded music since then, I would do it this way.

Oh, but how times have changed. I recently reformatted my hard drive and thought that it might be time to join the rest of the world in my MP3 encoding ways. I recently bought an IPod (which is awesome) and that comes with the MUSICMATCH Jukebox software. It has a handy little utility that “records” the CD, automatically creating MP3 files that are then added to your music library. While CD burning and music software has been doing this for years now, I have to admit that I’ve only just started using this feature and find it very convenient.

The funniest part of this whole thing is that when the software is done recording the CD, it plays a little sound to signal the completion. Amusingly enough, the default sound is the tada.wav file that has been on Windows system since at least Windows 95. It’s almost as if it’s saying, “Ta da! I’ve created some MP3 files! You’re now on the road to sharing copyrighted materials with the world!” Ha ha. It’s like a little magic trick.